David Hammons, Untitled, 1969

Monday mindfulness, courtesy of American artist David Hammons and one of his beautiful body prints. Created between 1968–1979, these were made by smearing either his own—or another’s—body with grease before pressing different body parts against paper. He then covered the imprint with charcoal and powdered pigment. “The resulting impressions are intimately direct indexes of faces, skin, and hair that exist somewhere between spectral portraits and physical traces,” explains The Drawing Center. “In a decade that was an inflection point for racial tension and racial justice in the United States, Hammons chose to use his own body to depict the quotidian joys and entrenched injustices of living as a Black man in midcentury America.”